Windows ME Networking


Recommended Posts

Hey there,

My boss loves his old Windows ME box and tomorrow we're finally adding a network card to it so we can use Dropbox on it (I hope)

Anyway, question is, how the hell do I get Windows Me to actually detect and use the network after adding in an ethernet card? I can handle drivers and all that, but in my experience Windows 9x was never very good at handling IP addresses and such.

Any tips you guys can give me so I don't make an ass of myself tomorrow.

Thanks

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/825118-windows-me-networking/
Share on other sites

You're thinking of Windows 95. By default 95 installed Netware and NetBEUI but not TCP/IP. Millennium supports TCP/IP by default when the network browser service is installed. What it doesn't do by default is file sharing, you need to add that manually.

You might want to get it on windows update, get the latest flash plugin etc on there for security if he plans to take it anywhere near the internet.

But in the past i've setup 9X systems in a VM and networking is a royal pain, nothing is automatic and it doesn't seam to support TCP/IP out of the box.

Windows has supported TCP/IP out of the box since Windows 95. If you had a problem setting it up in a VM, it was more than likely a problem with the VM settings.

  • 1 month later...

Opera works on Windows Me perfectly. it will also work on 98 but the theme engine may get screwed up due to a missing or outdated DLL (don't remember which)

Firefox 2.0 will work on 98 SE or newer

the latest Firefox 3.5.2 does not install on 98, the installer crashes. i am thinking it would do the same on Me

Opera over Firefox whenever possible. Opera is incredibly lightweight. ran it on my old ThinkPad 560Z... thats 98 SE and 64 megs of memory, on a 300mhz Pentium II

as for installing the NIC, make sure you have a flash drive or CD or floppy with the Me drivers on it. 98 SE drivers will work as well. drivers specifically written for 2000 Pro or XP will NOT work

before you do anything, make sure you have a Windows Me CD. it WILL ask you for the CD when it goes to install the networking components that are not installed by default on a networkless machine. if you do not have the CD ready and insert it when asked, it will fail to install these components and then you will be stuck with a NIC that appears to be installed but doesn't work.

once it is installed, DHCP will work perfectly. remember, Me is a 9x system so there is no ipconfig command. instead you can run a GUI utility called "winipcfg" at the Run prompt. it has buttons that control the DHCP functions Release and Renew

one note, it will take longer to boot if DHCP is enabled and there is no network attached. if you plug in the cable after you boot, you will probably have to do a release and renew via winipcfg. you may even have to reboot once or even twice

you might want to invest in a lightweight antivirus program and do the last of the Windows updates. but i don't really think it will harm if you do not bother with this step. "security via obsoleteness" might be enough

and before you consider ANY of this, be warned that even if you do everything right, it still might end up being botched or not working at all. if you can, i recommend Ghosting the machine's hard drive first

Wolf, yer friendly DOS/Win vet

Yeah, looks like the current version of Firefox only supports Windows 2000 and up.

For what it's worth, Seamonkey still supports Windows ME.

BTW, you know that Dropbox app is only supported on Windows XP and higher, right? Do people use it on WinME anyway? Oh, actually maybe you meant just using the Dropbox website?

  • 3 weeks later...

Yeah, Dropbox lists Windows XP as a minimum.

It may work on 2000, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I bet it won't be able to function AT ALL on Windows 9x/Me. Many apps now simply require the kernel of NT5+.

Lets look at things in perspective:

Windows XP is the minimum requirement for Dropbox. That came out over EIGHT years ago.

Is your boss really using a system so horribly outdated that it can't run XP?

You can get a budget system for around $200 that should run XP great.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Just pull a 4Chan and ignore the UK gov, or better troll them. It's not like they can enforce the fine across border.
    • It has NEVER been shown that all these overreaching creepy methods of surveillance have ever saved a child or prevented a terrorist attack. Not a single one. It's the kind of people like you who just wave it away as "paranoid conspiracy" that makes big tech and governments this creepy mass data hoarding entities. Not only that, 3/4 of these surveillance ideas undermine the very foundations of safe online communication because they always want to have a backdoor in everything "just in case" they might need it to... checks the notes "save the children". If you put a backdoor into encryption chain there is no encryption chain anymore. You know what encryption keeps safe? Your medical records, your online shopping and credit card during payment, your photos in the cloud, your emails, your passwords, everything. There is ZERO guarantee only the good guys will use it. And if you think police suddenly can't apprehend child abusers because of encryption, Epstein was running his entire sex trafficking ring using GMail which is not even encrypted end to end. Or to make matters even worse, USA has a **** and a good buddy of Epstein as a president. Absolutely NOTHING has been done to address it. Maxwell just got a better "hotel" room as a reward. This clearly shows how they absolutely don't really care about the children but they care about the absolute control over all of us. And you're defending them here. Good grief. On top of constant attempts to insert backdoors into encryption chain, the entire age verification nonsense is again entirely over reaching, creepy, invades everyone's privacy with premise of yet again "protecting the children" instead of demanding device makers to provide simple and powerful tools for PARENTS to control how their children use devices and what they do on them. THIS would be the way, not the stupid age verification for everyone. Imagine if government would be dictating companies how their phones work and not the company's IT department. The parents should be the IT department to their children. And for everyone excusing "they are not knowledgeable enough" buuuuuulsheat. We live in a digital age, if you have children now, you absolutely are well versed in digital everything at least to basic extent. If you're not, how do you even function in these times then? Reality is that parents are just lazy and don't want to deal with this. They want government to raise their kids because they are too busy scrolling stupid Instagram and Tiktok or some bs.
    • You could make the argument that K should not be included, but FC, the fried chicken, is not the framework, it's the product. It's the Paint in Paint.NET. A closer analogy is if KFC included the name of the deep fryer they used. HennyPennyFC.
    • Flying as the central point eh... As a massive Spyro fan who has replayed the Reignited Trilogy three times and the originals 4 times... I have some doubts, but maybe...
    • Apple is expanding Private Cloud Compute beyond its own data centers by Pradeep Viswanathan At WWDC 2026, as part of the improved Apple Intelligence capabilities, Apple today announced that it is expanding Private Cloud Compute (PCC), its privacy-focused cloud infrastructure for Apple Intelligence, beyond its own data centers for the first time. Private Cloud Compute was designed to handle Apple Intelligence requests that are too complex to run fully on-device. The PCC system does not store user data and does not allow Apple or anyone else to access user requests. Last year, Apple also expanded its Security Bounty program with rewards of up to $1 million for researchers who could find serious vulnerabilities in PCC. Until now, Apple's PCC data centers were using Apple's own silicon. As part of the expansion, Apple is working with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud systems powered by NVIDIA GPUs. Apple will be using this new infrastructure to execute more demanding AI tasks while maintaining the same privacy and security guarantees of PCC. The new implementation uses NVIDIA Confidential Computing with NVIDIA GPUs, Intel CPUs with TDX, and Google’s Titan chip. Apple says it has worked with Google to build additional protections beyond a traditional confidential computing deployment. Despite the expansion to third-party data centers, Apple claims that its core PCC requirements remain unchanged, including stateless computation, no privileged runtime access, non-targetability, and verifiable transparency. The company highlighted that it will continue to control the PCC software stack, and Apple devices will only trust PCC software that has been cryptographically approved by Apple. To take security to the next level, Apple mentioned that it is maintaining an append-only ledger of Google Cloud hardware that is part of the PCC fleet. The company claims this will help reduce the risk of supply chain attacks. In addition to AI infrastructure, Apple also worked with Google to use technologies behind the Gemini family of models to build the next generation of Apple Foundation Models to power Apple Intelligence features across on-device and cloud workloads. As expected, for more demanding AI tasks like agentic tool use and complex reasoning, Apple will rely on the expanded PCC infrastructure running on Google Cloud. The expansion of PCC on Google Cloud will gradually ramp toward the full set of protections during the summer preview period. As before, Apple will also publish binaries for public inspection, provide research tooling, and give researchers access to live PCC nodes in research mode through the Apple Security Bounty Program.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Very Popular
      Captain_Eric earned a badge
      Very Popular
    • One Month Later
      amusc earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Month Later
      DJC50PLUS earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      DJC50PLUS earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Proficient
      Eric Biran went up a rank
      Proficient
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      506
    2. 2
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      222
    3. 3
      ATLien_0
      92
    4. 4
      +Edouard
      86
    5. 5
      Steven P.
      81
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!